At 15, I made the decision to leave home and school to work on some of the world's largest cattle stations. Over the next two years, i was attacked by a few wild animals,experienced unexplained phenomenon, had a massive learning curve and truly experienced the Australian outback.

A Horse in the House? Things are hard for eleven-year-old Yonder. Her mother died and her father has sunk into sadness. She doesn't have a friend to her name . . . except for Dirt, the Shetland pony next door.Dirt has problems of his own. He's overweight, he's always in trouble, and his owner is the mean Miss Enid, who doesn't have the patience for a pony's natural curiosity. His only friend is Yonder, the scrawny girl next door.So when Miss Enid decides to sell Dirt for horsemeat, Yonder knows she has to find a way to rescue him. Even if that means stealing Dirt away and sneaking him into her own house. What follows will make you worry, will make you cry, and will ultimately fill you with hope, love, and an unshakable belief in the power of friendship. Especially the four-legged kind.

In this riveting, action-packed novel from award-winning author Will Hobbs, a teenage boy hoping to help his loved ones must fight for his life as he makes the dangerous journey across the Mexican border into the United States. When falling crop prices threaten his family with starvation, fifteen-year-old Victor Flores heads north in an attempt to "cross the wire" from Mexico into America so he can find work and help ease the finances at home. But with no coyote money to pay the smugglers who sneak illegal workers across the border, Victor struggles to survive as he jumps trains, stows away on trucks, and hikes grueling miles through the Arizona desert. Victor's passage is fraught with freezing cold, scorching heat, hunger, and dead ends. It's a gauntlet run by many attempting to cross the border, but few make it. Through Victor's desperate perseverance, Will Hobbs brings to life a story that is true for many, polarizing for some, but life-changing for all who read it. Acclaim for Crossing the Wire includes the following: New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age, Junior Library Guild Selection, Americas Awards Commended Title, Heartland Award, Southwest Book Award, and Notable Books for Global Society.

A lively and lyrical account of one woman’s unlikely apprenticeship on a national park trail crew—and what she discovers about nature, gender, and the value of hard work Christine Byl first encountered the national parks the way most of us do: on vacation. But after she graduated from college, broke and ready for a new challenge, she joined a Glacier National Park trail crew as a seasonal “traildog” maintaining mountain trails for the millions of visitors Glacier draws every year. Byl first thought of the job as a paycheck, a summer diversion, a welcome break from “the real world” before going on to graduate school. She came to find out that work in the woods on a trail crew was more demanding, more rewarding—more real—than she ever imagined. During her first season, Byl embraces the backbreaking difficulty of the work, learning how to clear trees, move boulders, and build stairs in the backcountry. Her first mentors are the colorful characters with whom she works—the packers, sawyers, and traildogs from all walks of life—along with the tools in her hands: axe, shovel, chainsaw, rock bar. As she invests herself deeply in new work, the mountains, rivers, animals, and weather become teachers as well. While Byl expected that her tenure at the parks would be temporary, she ends up turning this summer gig into a decades-long job, moving from Montana to Alaska, breaking expectations—including her own—that she would follow a “professional” career path. Returning season after season, she eventually leads her own crews, mentoring other trail dogs along the way. In Dirt Work, Byl probes common assumptions about the division between mental and physical labor, “women’s work” and “men’s work,” white collars and blue collars. The supposedly simple work of digging holes, dropping trees, and blasting snowdrifts in fact offers her an education of the hands and the head, as well as membership in an utterly unique subculture. Dirt Work is a contemplative but unsentimental look at the pleasures of labor, the challenges of apprenticeship, and the way a place becomes a home.

Woof! Meet Roy, an adorable white dog who is wild about digging, digging, digging in the dirt! David Shannon's picture books are loved for their endearing characters and laugh-aloud humor, and Roy's charming naughtiness will remind readers of what they love about Shannon's No, David!, a bestselling Caldecott Honor Book about a boy with a nose for trouble.Although it's a smelly task for those who have to constantly bathe him, Roy's happiness centers on his very favorite thing-dirt-and from sunrise to sunset, he burrows in it, rolls in it, and digs up buried treasures. There's terror in every terrier, and when Roy runs into the house after being sprayed by a skunk, he faces the dreaded bathtub. Readers will see themselves in Roy's childlike delight each time he makes the biggest mess ever.

Student engagement happens as a result of a teacher’s careful planning and execution of specific strategies. This self-study text provides in-depth understanding of how to generate high levels of student attention and engagement. Using the suggestions in this book, every teacher can create a classroom environment where engagement is the norm, not the exception.

I Love Dirt! presents 52 open-ended activities to help you engage your child in the outdoors. No matter what your location—from a small patch of green in the city to the wide-open meadows of the country—each activity is meant to promote exploration, stimulate imagination, and heighten a child's sense of wonder. Jennifer Ward is the author of numerous acclaimed parenting books and books for children, inspired by nature. "Jennifer Ward has created a book that will serve to gently introduce parents to nature, even as parents are using it to help guide a child into the narural world. Children—and parents—learn to observe, as well as appreciate, the basic joys of getting their hands dirty and feet wet. Discoveres become shared experience."—from the forword by Richard Louv

Brief text explores how soil is formed, its layers, and its importance as a natural resource that living things need to survive.

"Merges research-based Retrospective Miscue Analysis with adapted Socratic Circle discussions, thus empowering all elementary readers to collaboratively identify and verbalize reading strategies, individually experience ownership and control as readers, and effectively build both literacy and language confidence and competence within a united classroom community." —Marjorie R. Hancock, Professor Emerita of Elementary Education Kansas State University Help your students learn from each other and become skillful, confident readers! How can teachers ensure that each child becomes a better reader? Building Classroom Reading Communities presents a successful approach for motivating students as individual readers while encouraging peer-to-peer learning. By showing how to use Retrospective Miscue Analysis (RMA) and Socratic Circles together, the authors help teachers create a sense of community in the classroom and promote achievement for every student. The authors show how RMA—which develops students′ comprehension and fluency by analyzing their mistakes as they read aloud—can be used to provide a window into each student′s progress. The interactive discussion techniques used in Socratic Circles then extend learning in small groups and classwide. Teachers, literacy coaches, and others will find: Assessment strategies and step-by-step guidance to implementing RMA and Socratic Circles Insights on improving student skills in vocabulary, language structure, comprehension, and other key areas Flexible, adaptable techniques for readers of all abilities Numerous vignettes showing the use of RMA with Socratic Circles in the classroom Discover a fresh approach to teaching literacy that is well-grounded in theory and practice!